The Political Mystery of Malaysia Flight 370

[Update: The Prime Minister of Malaysia said Saturday that data now showed “movements consistent with the deliberate action of someone on the plane.” Possible trajectories, based on pings picked up by satellite, now range north to Kazakhstan and south to islands off the west coast of Australia.]

Plane crashes are always political. That principle is on full view in the discordant mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which grew even murkier on Thursday, with reports that the plane may have flown for four hours after contact was lost. That information was attributed to Obama Administration officials, who offered it to explain why American military assets might be deployed to a new body of water. The search has hopped from the Gulf of Thailand, crossing the breadth of the Malaysian peninsula to the Strait of Malacca, and now to the Indian Ocean. Malaysian authorities had denied a similar report a few hours earlier, but, then, no one knows anymore what to make of all the statements from that quarter. There have been so many contradictions that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the Malaysians stopped talking sense. It is clear that they are not making the government of China very happy. On Thursday, Chinese state television and Malaysia’s Transport Minister were openly disagreeing about the usefulness of a satellite photo showing a piece of ocean garbage floating off the coast of Vietnam.

It doesn’t take terrorists shouting slogans to insert politics into an aviation disaster. That scenario hasn’t been ruled out in the case of Flight 370—nothing has, really. (Though if terrorists are responsible, why are none of them bragging about it?) But every flight in the air is guided by regulations and administrative bodies, covenants and international treaties, on paths that reflect trade-offs in security and free movement. When something goes wrong those choices are scrutinized. Transportation officials and other bureaucrats rush to the scene—often officials from more than one nation. Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, last Saturday, on its way to Beijing, and while a hundred and fifty-two of its two hundred and thirty-nine passengers and crew members were Chinese, the rest carried more than a dozen countries’ passports, including two stolen ones. Such a mixture is common; homogenous flights are more and more the oddities.

At the Beijing airport, where the plane was supposed to land, one passenger’s relative threw a water bottle at a Malaysia Airlines executive, the Times reported. The families also made clear that they expected their government to pressure the Malaysians on their behalf—to throw its own political and economic bottles. (Malaysia has a Chinese ethnic minority that has, historically, been left out politically; it also does a lot of business with China.) “Why don’t you give us some answers?” a Chinese woman at the airport shouted at a delegation of her own country’s officials—representing four different government bodies, according to the Times. “Do you know how much pain we’re in? Those are our children!”

The pain must be worsened by the weirdness of the plane’s loss. Flight 370 took off at 12:41 A.M., Kuala Lumpur-time, and the first reports stated that all contact was lost two hours later. That figure was later revised to approximately forty-five minutes, but at any rate it meant that everyone was looking for oil slicks and debris in a certain region of the Gulf of Thailand, along a segment of the flight’s planned path. There wasn’t anything there. The early discussion centered on what could have brought a plane with a good safety record down—sudden electrical or structural failure, or a mistake by the crew—the gaps in radar coverage are more numerous than one would think; this is one area in which our presumptions of official surveillance are disappointed. But after a day or two of planes and helicopters criss-crossing the gulf, even aviation experts were disconcerted. The Chinese Foreign ministry said that the Malaysians had to “step up”; China’s Global Timeswarned “the Malaysian side” not to “shirk its responsibilities.”

And then the Malaysians, without quite explaining why, started looking on the other side of their country, in the Straits of Malacca, near the island of Penang. There were reports that the plane had been tracked making a hard left turn—maybe terrorists were involved. Perhaps hijackers had disabled the transponder; maybe the crew was trying to turn back. But had the plane really veered off? It was only on Wednesday, after some significant rhetorical course changes, that General Rodzali Daud, the chief of Malaysia’s air force, allowed that there had been some radar pings the military couldn’t account for in the new area. But, he said, they could have come from another mystery plane. Relatives of the passengers wondered, reasonably and furiously, why he hadn’t mentioned all this a few days earlier.

The Malaysians flatly denied the Wall Street Journal’s report, on Wednesday, that there was data showing that the plane kept operating somewhere—that Rolls Royce, the manufacturer of the engines, had received some transmitted data, a claim the Malaysians dismissed. The Journal later said that it was actually data from satellites, and, on Thursday, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said that there was “new information.” The data, supposedly, suggested that the plane kept operating for four hours after it was thought lost; at least, its systems seem to have tried to contact satellites for that long.

No one knows where this airplane is, or what might have happened to it. The Post has a good map showing the possible new range of the search: four hours could have taken the plane twenty-four hundred miles away, but it had seven hours’ worth of fuel, so maybe it was four thousand miles; Flight 370 could, by that measure, have made it to Somalia. The Times, citing the spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, reported that India had sent “three ships, two airplanes and a helicopter” into the Andaman Sea—another country with officials making statements, with their own habits and obligations.

The families waiting at the airports are, as always, left to test the mechanisms of transparency, accountability, and press freedom in their own countries or someone else’s. They are like desperate dissidents who really don’t care if they get in trouble for shouting out unwelcome questions or calling a powerful man a liar. What more can they lose? When they stare at maps, what lines, beyond borders, do they see?

Photograph by Lai Seng Sin/AP.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.